Green Papaya Recipe

Introducing the green papaya recipe using coconut milk. Yep, this fruit is a vegetable when they're still green.

This green papaya recipe might be a wee bit different that your everyday cooking recipe. You cannot eat a papaya when it's still green unless you make it pickled like the Filipino 'atsara'. You just have to cook it.

Cooked Green Papaya in coconut milk along with some greens and some sitaw a.k.a long beans. This is adopted from Bicol Philippines where Bicolanos love their coconut milk.

This green papaya dish is as Bicolana as you can get. You know why? Well, it's because there goes the coconut milk in it again. You know how they love that stuff in this region of the Philippines called Bicol.

I live in South Florida now after being wintered for 33 years in New York and I gotta tell ya' that I love growing papayas here.

Papaya trees are so easy to grow here in South Florida. Mind you I have a whole row of papaya trees growing on both sides of the house.

I just had to reminisce my childhood memories eating cooked green papayas as a dish served with hot steamed rice freshly harvested from a rice field back in the day.

The Green Papaya Recipe

1 Medium Size Papaya peeled and sliced thin

1 cup fresh coconut milk

2 stalks of lemon grass with the base and leaves trimmed and pounded to release all the flavor.

salt and pepper to taste

mashed or grated piece of ginger

5 cloves of garlic or more if you like them so much like I do

1 medium onion, sliced

(there's some greens added here with some long beans that you can skip if you want)

Note: Filipinos use fish in this recipe. They call it 'bangot'. The most favored bangot to this dish is either dried fish or shrimp which is called hipon. But this is a Filipino vegetarian recipe, so we are not using any 'bangot' here.

*** You can add mushrooms if you have any!

Helpful Tip:

Cooking this type of recipe is better when you use a wok. In every Filipino kitchen, there's always a wok. It's a number one used pan for stir-frying, sauteing and you can even use it as a basin or a big bowl for mixing.

Peel the green papaya and open it. Remove the seeds. Cut it in quarters lengthwise and slice each quarter thinly.

In a wok, put the coconut milk in. Add the garlic, grated ginger and sliced onion along with the salt and pepper to taste.

Basically, just put all the ingredients together in the wok except the sliced green papaya and let the coconut milk boil.

Then when it starts to boil, add in the sliced green papaya into the wok. Give it a stir and cover. Reduce the heat a little bit. Continue cooking until the papaya is tender. Test it with a fork.

Give it a taste. Remove the wok from heat.

Serve with fresh steamed rice.

Eat like a Filipino. Pinoys eat with their hands you know, no utensils required. No, seriously, enjoy this different dish.

It smells marvelously delicious with the garlic, the onion and the lemon grass together with the coconut milk!

It's clean Filipino vegetarian food cooked in a Filipino American kitchen. It's good authentic Asian food picked directly from the papaya tree growing in the backyard.

So if you think cooking green papaya is something you have never heard of, now you do. You can't eat a green papaya vegetable because it's not edible when it's still green.

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Hiya friends!

My name is Pura. That's pronounced as Poorra with a short 'ooh' sound and an emphasis on the 'r'. Italians call me Poora which is close enough. Spanish folks also call me Poora which is about right. Here in America, they call me Pyura or Pawra - it's a cruel world. Hmm. My mother called me Nene, which means baby girl in Filipino.

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